#coastal picket fleet

[a-solitary-sea-rover-backup]

It was the afternoon of December 3, 1942, and a vicious winter storm was thrashing boats along the Eastern Seaboard. U.S. Navy and Coast Guard listening stations were picking up urgent distress signals up and down the coast. A 71-foot schooner called the Nordlys, fighting 60-foot waves, had lost its sails to 50-knot winds. A sailboat called the Abenaki was completely adrift and at the mercy of the storm after its tiller was destroyed. The crew of a boat called the Tradition radioed a possible farewell: “This may be our last transmission.”

Sailboats had no business being out in such weather, but that calculus didn’t apply to those serving in the Coastal Picket Force, a motley assortment of privately owned vessels, from luxury schooners to battered fishing boats, that had been called into wartime service. Manned by hastily recruited citizen sailors, the Picket Force was tasked with patrolling American waters from Maine to Florida and along the West Coast. Its primary objective in the Atlantic: to spot and report German U-boats, which were wreaking havoc on Allied ships. In May alone, the Nazi submarine fleet sank 115 ships in the western Atlantic.

The mariners aboard the vessels of the Picket Force could hardly take out enemy submarines; they carried little more than guns. They could, however, report U-boat positions, neutralizing the German vessels’ essential advantage: stealth. But most of the American boats, designed for fishing or weekend cruises, were unequipped for winter conditions in the North Atlantic, let alone a storm witnesses later described as a combination blizzard and hurricane.

Now one of the smaller crafts in the civilian fleet was trapped in the tempest: a sleek 57-foot sailboat called the Zaida. The boat’s nine-man crew struggled for hours as the storm battered the yacht, throwing it off its position near Martha’s Vineyard. As the winds intensified, the men watched the mainmast bend feebly, with wave after wave drenching the ship’s deck and flooding into the cabin.

[obtener2]

"Sailboats had no business being out in such weather, but that calculus didn’t apply to those serving in the Coastal Picket Force, a motley assortment of privately owned vessels…that had been called into wartime service. Manned by hastily recruited citizen sailors, the Picket Force was tasked with patrolling American waters from Maine to Florida and along the West Coast. Its primary objective in the Atlantic: to spot and report German U-boats, which were wreaking havoc on Allied ships. In May alone, the Nazi submarine fleet sank 115 ships in the western Atlantic." Smithsonian

[lhs3020b]

In a very unexpected moment tonight, I found myself writing something. Yes, some actual fiction. Umm, wow. It’s not particularly-polished, I certainly wouldn’t call it “good”, but nonetheless, here is a thing.

This is a ghost from an old, 2015-era writing project of mine. You probably will have seen bits of it before. This would be the opening portion of the novel, if the novel was still in any way a possibility. The two main characters meet and compare notes on themselves and the confusing mess of the world they live in.

(A passing content note: their world is recovering in some ways and has been worse inside both Tai and Corazon’s lifetimes, but it is not a happy place, and some very bad things have happened. So a measure of reader discretion is advised.)

(Also, yes, the ending is quite abrupt - it’s 2 AM so I should probably consider calling it a night.)

Anyway, have about ~3500 words of fiction...

               ‘We have arrived at the Corazon residence,’ the car said.

               Lieutenant Tai Zhang looked up from her phone. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Lock the doors while I’m out, but don’t drive off. I should only be a few minutes.’

               The car said, ‘For insurance purposes I’m instructed to remind you that I have an anti-carjacking protocol-’

               ‘Yes, yes, of course,’ Tai sighed. ‘If one of the locals tries to put you up on bricks, you’ll zap them with a stun charge and zoom off. And howl for the police. Who may even turn up, who knows. And Dr Corazon and I will have to walk back to the Fleet base. I get it, I get it. Now let me get on with my job.’

               The car took the hint and shut up. It wasn’t a full Tech Mind, of course – no way could the Navy afford their contracting rates – but its social simulation unit wasn’t entirely stupid either. The door unfolded upwards. Hot, damp January air flooded in, along with the smells of the city. Vegetation, oil, a hint of sewage and a whiff of something rotten. Actually, compared to the New Dockside area, this wasn’t so bad.

               Tai climbed out of the car; the door hissed down behind her. She took a look around herself. She was stood on a cracked and pitted curbside. Amazingly, it looked like pre-Contact concrete. There was certainly no sign that it had experienced any recent maintenance. To judge from the fractured blocks, some of which lay out of place, it may well not have had any repairs since the early 2040s.

               ‘At least there is a pavement around here,’ Tai muttered. New London had a lot of dirt tracks; the first tsunami had sunk a good chunk of the old city and the quakes had done for a lot of what survived. Rock One, after all, had come down right in the middle of the North Sea. Whilst it had been the smallest of the two impactors, nonetheless it had been big enough. It was fair to say that coastal and near-coastal Europe had had a bad day.

               Just as the car had promised, Corazon’s house was right in front of her. Tai was interested to note that it was a treehouse, clearly post-Contact. All bulbous and round, big fat leaves hanging over its top. Windows and a door had been incorporated into the bioengineered wood. The house-tree seemed fully grown, and from the lichen on the bark, it had to be at least a few years old. As she looked around, Tai saw that most of the neighbouring dwellings were also treehouses, though confusingly, there was a surviving pre-Contact apartment block on the corner of the street. The brickwork and the old-style PVC windows looked incredibly out of place, the building equivalent of a fly stuck in amber.

               Tai fingered the collar of her uniform jacket. She felt uncomfortably-hot. A glance at her phone revealed that the air temperature was hovering around twenty-five degrees Celsius – not exceptionally hot for the time of year, but certainly enough to be unpleasant. No point wasting any time, then. She needed to go and collect their guest.

               Tai opened the little picket-fence gate in front of the house and started down the path. Next to her, an array of solar panels was tracking the Sun. Corazon’s garden also had a backup wind turbine, parked on the opposite side of the path. Apparently the academic didn’t trust the municipal grid. Honestly, Tai couldn’t blame him, though on the other hand it did seem a bit excessive. After all, this was the 2060s, not the ‘50s. Even a chaotic urban mess like New London averaged about six hours’ reliable electricity per day.

               Tai reached the door. She lifted her hand and knocked smartly on it, rapping three times. It was an Academy instinct, repeatedly burnt into her brain by the Fleet’s officer candidate school. You always knocked three times and waited before entering, unless of course you really liked doing lots of push-ups. This January morning was, in Tai’s opinion, far too hot for push-ups.

               She heard some clattering from inside the house. ‘Wait, wait, I’m on my way!’ a muffled voice said. It was male, with an accent she couldn’t quite place.

               The door opened. Tai blinked. ‘Uh,’ she said.

               The man looked at her, seeming a bit confused. Then recognition flickered across his face. ‘Oh of course!’ he said. ‘You’re from the Fleet, aren’t you. They said they’d be sending a car, though I did wonder if it would actually turn up.’

               Tai managed to recover her surprise. She hadn’t realised that her passenger-to-be was old. From his grey hair and wrinkled face, he couldn’t be under fifty. With a slight shiver, Tai realised what that meant – he’d been born, and had grown up, beforehand. Before all of it happened.

               ‘Dr Carlos Corazon, I assume?’ she said. He nodded. ‘Lovely to meet you. I’m Lieutenant Tai Zhang, and I’ve been tasked with bringing you to the shuttle-dock. We’ll be going up to the Relentless together, for the shakedown flight.’

               Corazon blinked. ‘They’re farming out their officers on taxi duty? The Navy really must be a bit strained.’

               Oh great, Corazon was one of those people who thought the Navy was a waste of time. It was certainly a common opinion throughout AU-Earth. Certainly it wasn’t entirely wrong. Even the most powerful human-built warship wouldn’t do much damage to even a small Spiral Fleet cruiser. Still, Tai felt this criticism missed the point somewhat. Even if the AU-E Fleet was mostly an exercise in public relations, it was still important to show that the AU-E had something to offer to the wider Concordium.

               Also, Corazon had another point, though she doubted he realised it. Tai had no sooner arrived at the ship then she’d found herself immediately ordered off it again, to go and collect some random civilian. She supposed it reflected the last-minute chaos going on within the ship’s complement as it got ready for its first ever flight as an actual ship of the line. A lot of the ship’s officers hadn’t even arrived until yesterday; Tai wasn’t even the latest assignee to make their way to their birth. They were due to undock in less than twenty-four hours; this was not the best use of her time. Tai should be down in Engineering, meeting with her department, getting to know the crew’s names and faces and getting their shift-schedules and duty rosters finalised.

               Instead she was here, stood on a doormat somewhere out in New London’s half-resurrected urban carcass.

               ‘Well,’ she said, ‘the sooner we’re under way, the better.’

               The Relentless was the Fleet’s newest warship; its maiden voyage would also be carrying a complement of notaries. Some of them were journalists, some of them were various apparatchiks linked to the current federal coalition government, and a few were people of note from wider society. Dr Corazon was apparently somewhat known within the astronomical community, presumably hence his invitation.

               ‘Cool,’ Corazon said. ‘Just let me grab my bag…’

               He turned around and disappeared back into the house. Tai fought the urge to roll her eyes at his disorganisation. A few moments later, the academic reappeared, clutching a carry-bag. To Tai’s eyes it didn’t look like he had remotely enough changes of clothes – but, she decided that was his problem and not hers.

               ‘This way,’ she said, gesturing him toward the car.

               He closed the door of the house behind him, locking then double-locking it. ‘Just let me arm the security system,’ he said, pulling out his phone. Tai waited patiently as Corazon fiddled with the keys. Something beeped and he looked satisfied. His phone disappeared back into a pocket. This at least was an urge Tai could understand.

               ‘Lots of crime around here?’ she asked.

               He shrugged. ‘Some. Barnet’s not too bad. There are worse boroughs, it’s actually fairly good around here. Most people on this street have formal jobs, you know?’

               ‘That might attract the gangs,’ Tai noted. ‘Rich neighbourhood and all that.’

               Corazon shrugged. ‘My security system is a licensed Tech Mind unit. Non-sentient, of course, but advanced enough to handle itself.’

               ‘That and a treehouse,’ Tai observed. ‘Those are triffid products. You clearly like your aliens.’

               They started walking toward the car. Corazon said, ‘Might as well get used to it. They’re here to stay, you know. I probably know that better than most.’

               ‘If you don’t mind me asking,’ Tai said, ‘how old are you?’

               Corazon rolled his eyes. ‘I knew that question was coming. I get that a lot. Apparently I’m the first old man some of our undergraduates have ever seen.’

               That was unlikely in practise – even today, about twenty percent of the AU-E’s population had been born before 2040 – but it wasn’t entirely-impossible either. People in the mid-to-late 2040s and the ‘50s had produced a lot of kids, and that was probably just as well given how few of them there had been left. The New Baby Boom was showing signs of cooling down, though honestly, that was probably not a bad thing either. The planet wasn’t in a great state, and overshooting its carrying capacity was probably a bad idea.

               ‘You didn’t answer the question,’ Tai said.

               Corazon looked irritated. ‘No, I suppose I didn’t, did I? All right, if you insist, I’m sixty-three. I was born in 2004.’

               Tai blinked. ‘Shit,’ she said.

               ‘Yeah,’ Corazon agreed. There wasn’t any need to elaborate on that one.

               An awkward silence descended as they approached the car. Tai sent the all-clear to the security system. The doors were folding up and quite suddenly, it began to get dark. Tai felt confused – she couldn’t see any clouds and the forecast for the day had been for clear weather.

               ‘Oh,’ Corazon said. ‘Of course. Right on cue!’ He pointed up at the sky.

               Tai glanced quickly upwards. A big bite was eating the side of the Sun. Corazon said, ‘Parasol Two. Bang on time.’

               Oh, of course. Tai had completely forgotten about the parasol-satellite’s scheduled appointment with the Sun.

               ‘Let’s get in the car,’ Tai said. Even though this was a relatively upscale neighbourhood, she didn’t really want to be stood around on the pavement during the parasol-eclipse. There was such a thing as asking for trouble.

               Corazon needed no urging. Moments later they were both safely ensconced in the car. Outside, smoothly and without fuss, an artificial night was falling over the city. Lights flickered on inside buildings, stars bloomed across the now-nightfallen heavens and a few of the streetlights even turned on. The rest were either broken or missing their bulbs.

               ‘Car,’ Tai said, ‘take us to the Fleet’s dockside complex, please.’

               ��Acknowledged,’ the vehicle’s electronic voice said.

The electric engine gently purred to life and the headlights came on. The car pulled out from the curb and began its journey through the city.

‘It will rain later, I expect,’ Corazon remarked. ‘Once the Parasol moves over, I mean. The drop in air temperature can drive condensation in the clouds.’

The forecast hadn’t mentioned that, but Tai supposed it wouldn’t be surprising if it was wrong.

‘Do you find the eclipses weird?’ Tai asked. She realised, just a moment too late, that the question was probably too personal and probably too judgemental. Her passenger certainly thought so. Even in the internal lights of the car, his face darkened.

‘Young lady,’ Corazon snapped, ‘I find everything about this world weird. This is nothing like the place I thought I’d grow old in. It’s the same planet, but a different universe. Though I’m sure that won’t make much sense to you. From the looks of you I’m guessing you’re a post-Contact child.’

He was, Tai thought, rather patronising. She wondered if it was deliberate. No, she didn’t think so. It was just how he was. Perhaps this had been normal behaviour, perfectly average for the world prior to June the Eighth, 2040.

‘I was born in 2042,’ Tai said. ‘I never knew my parents. They got Lung Rot and died not long after I was born.’

The academic didn’t appear to have heard her. He was still staring upwards at the sky.

‘No,’ Corazon said, ‘at least the eclipses make sense. Giant mirror-satellites in orbit, blocking out some sunlight, keeping the temperatures down. Stopping a damaged atmosphere from frying the planet. People did have ideas like that, you know, before. The Contact War made it worse, but climate change existed before 2040. Hell, I vaguely remember hearing about it back in the 2000s!’

Tai boggled. ‘You remember back then?’

‘A bit. I was six in 2010, remember? I do recall the family being very upset about something around ‘08, though I didn’t really understand it.’

‘What could it have been?’ Tai asked. ‘There weren’t any problems then!’

‘There was a planet-wide economic collapse,’ Corazon said. ‘Though nothing like as bad as what happened in the Forties – or the Twenties, for that matter. Anyway it hardly matters now. It was something we did to ourselves, without any external help.’ He looked at the sky, and shuddered. A haunted expression flooded across his face. ‘You know, not like that.’

The artificial night had filled the sky with stars. Some of them were moving – spacecraft, on their journeys to and from any number of destinations. A lot of them were concentrated in the direction of the Moon, though there was no surprise there. The Moon was the main reason the Spiral Concordium bothered with Sol and its planets, after all. It was indirectly the source of all this trouble.

But Corazon wasn’t looking at any of that. His eyes were locked on something else, lower down in the sky. It was pitted and cratered, a rough spheroid, greyish in colour. It was currently in crescent phase, hanging low in the sky and close to the artifically-occluded Sun. But there was no mistaking it.

‘Rock Three,’ Corazon said. ‘That fucker. The one that would have ended us.’

It was harmless now, of course. The 3008th Division of the Spiral Fleet had seen to that, stabilising it onto a safe-if-low orbit around the Earth. But the engineers of the New And Bountiful Prosperity Combine had done their work correctly – had Rock Three impacted, it would have been sufficient to end the Earth’s biosphere, and hide all the evidence of New Prosperity’s crimes forever. The Moon would have been theirs, along with all its reserves of precious Lovecraftium, and the uninhabitable neighbouring planet would have been passed off as a tragic cosmic accident.

‘Three hundred miles wide,’ Corazon said. ‘They actually towed it in all the way from the Kuiper Disc. It wasn’t even in our records before they tossed it at us. Not even a tsunami-making rock. An ocean-boiling rock.’

Rock Three was now a de facto second moon and a permanent fixture in the Earth’s skies, but it was also something that had very nearly been the tombstone for an entire planet. For all the horror they had inflicted, for all the hundreds of millions of people they’d killed, Rocks One and Two had merely been the opening salvos.

‘And of course they tossed in Lung Rot,’ Tai said. ‘As a nice little fuck-you parting-shot.’

‘Yeah, had that.’ Corazon looked grim, then he shrugged. ‘Wasn’t fun. It was like doing Covid all over again. Just joyous. Gotta love hacking up fungal slime out of your own alveoli all day.’

He shuddered. It was a whole-body convulsion.

The Contact War and the two Rocks had been bad, but it was Lung Rot that had done the real, lasting damage. During the early Forties, people had been dying fast enough that the survival of the species had seemed in question for a time, though in practise the Spiral Concordium would never have allowed that. Even if it required raising a cloned population somewhere else, in some carefully-sterilised biodome on some other planet, the Concordium would not have allowed an actual extinction-event. The whole point of the galactic union, for all of its many flaws, was preventing exactly that sort of horror. The Contact War itself should never have happened, of course, but once the Concordium had belatedly become aware of what New Prosperity was doing, they had moved to shut it down. New Prosperity no longer existed; the entire organisation had been declared traitors and anyone who survived the Battle of Earth had been mercilessly hunted down. If there were any former Prosperity scions left out there somewhere, they knew better by now then to advertise their survival.

Lung Rot had been a vicious punch in the face, a final little parting-present from New Prosperity, the spores air-dropped into multiple locations across the Earth even as the Combine’s forces crumbled under the Spiral assault. No-one was really sure why they’d done it. It had gained them nothing; if Rock Three had left any questions unanswered, then Lung Rot surely had removed any doubt about the Combine’s intentions. Their fall had been absolute, from one of the oldest, wealthiest and most-celebrated organisations in the Milky Way to one of the most-despised collections of traitors who had ever lived.

Suddenly, Tai had to talk. The urge was abrupt, dominating, complete. It was probably also a bad idea, but you didn’t always get the choice with these things. The words were flowing from her mouth, and like it or not, they weren’t going to just magically turn off.

‘My earliest actual memory is when they sprayed the camps,’ Tai said. ‘I was in one of the refugee ones, just another orphaned toddler. I had a cough by then, of course. Everyone did. There was space in our tent – a lot of people had been taken out. New people weren’t coming in, not anymore. I didn’t really know what it meant then, of course. But then one day people were – excited? It was weird. I’d never seen them like that. There was suddenly not any crying. People were hugging each other and smiling. I remember they pulled me out of the tent. People were coming out of the tents, everywhere. There was an actual crowd. Cheering, even! It was some triffids that came through. They were pulling a spray-tank. They sprayed all of us – one of them even shoved the nozzle in my mouth!’

‘And the retroviral agent re-wrote your lungs,’ Corazon noted. ‘So they now secrete a natural fungicide, keeping the Lung Rot mycelium at subclinical levels. Yeah, something similar happened to me. Kind of crazy, one of the happiest days of my life, you know? The day in 2045, when the aliens came to genetically-engineer all of us.’ He shook his head. ‘Flying saucers spraying the cities with bio-agents, and people dancing in the streets below! Would’ve been unimaginable just ten years before.’

This chatter was, of course, a normal thing. Tai had had lots of conversations like this. It was quite an average event for people to compare their traumas – virtually everyone living in the AU-Earth had some emotional burden that they were carrying around with them. It was true that social conditions were improving – things were merely “bad” now, rather then the “borderline-apocalyptic” of twenty years previously – but an important part of getting to know someone was trying to gently figure out where their personal sore spots and pain-points lay. Triggering someone into a flashback episode was generally considered to be a social faux pas, especially if it was done deliberately. There were also practical concerns too. It was difficult for a workplace to function if half its staff were either lying on the floor sobbing or had been driven to flee the building by their own inner demons.

Corazon sighed, shrugged and opened his bag. Tai read that as his cue to dismiss this topic. He’d said his piece. And so, she supposed, had she. He knew not to mention the camps, she knew not to mention Lung Rot. They’d told each other what they needed to know, and now it was time to move smoothly onwards.

To Tai’s surprise, he pulled out a pair of knitting needles and a ball of wool. Moments later, a pair of half-finished socks emerged. ‘I am glad someone decided to save the sheep,’ he remarked. ‘We lost so many of the others.’

Lung Rot had been aimed at humans, of course, but the mycelium was at home in any warm, enclosed, moist, dark space. There had been extinctions all throughout Class Mammalia. A whole host of species now only existed as captive populations in carefully-maintained bio-domes, and they were the lucky ones. Someone had cared enough to try to rescue them, during the end of the world.

And the less said about that, the better.

‘You like knitting?’ Tai asked.

Corazon nodded. ‘Actually I make sixty percent of my income from it. My lectureship is nice, but academia is more like a hobby with an office.’ He started up on the socks, the needles twisting and twirling through a series of moves that Tai’s eyes struggled to follow.

‘You sell socks?’ Tai asked. It didn’t surprise her that Corazon had a side-hustle – the AU-Earth’s budgetary situation was tight, and that was very visible in public sector salaries. It was just as well that Tai’s role as an officer came with government-subsidised housing, because there was no way she could afford anything minimally-pleasant on the private market.

‘No, scarves, usually,’ Corazon said. ‘They’re mostly bought by ash lizards. I got into it almost by accident, when I went to Nine Shadows And Six Rivers back in ’52. Took my needles and stuff with me, made a scarf on the ship out. It was just something to do, you know? But when we arrived I gave it to one of our liaison team, as a gift – and they loved it. Before I knew it I had a waiting-list of gender-bending alien lizards, who all wanted individual knitted scarves.’ He snorted. ‘I got to live the high life out on Nine Shadows, while the rest of the exchange group had to slum it, down on the cheap floors of the arcology.’

‘Oh of course,’ Tai said. ‘They like decoration, don’t they?’

‘They don’t go in for clothes in quite the way we do – heat retention messes up their metabolisms something chronic. But they do go in for decoration. Necklaces, wrist-sheathes, sashes. Scarves. Natural materials are particularly-prized.’ He shrugged. ‘Who would have known that knitted goods would be a key export from this planet?’

[pattern-53-enfield]

Coast Guardsmen in cold-weather gear aboard a sailing ship of the “Corsair Fleet”, civilian vessels of the Coastal Picket Force who volunteered to augment the small fleet the USCG had in late 1941.